In many countries hate-speech is a crime. Should thought-speech be a crime too?

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Freedom of Speech is one of the most cherished ideas in the United States, and one of this country’s founding ideas. I think it is an idea worth defending.
 
The Catholic Church. From the CCC: [1935](javascript:openWindow(‘cr/1935.htm’)😉 The equality of men rests essentially on their dignity as persons and the rights that flow from it:

Every form of social or cultural discrimination in fundamental personal rights on the grounds of sex, race, color, social conditions, language, or religion must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God’s design.40
 
We are about to discover just how meaningless and harmful the term “hate speech” can be, as it won’t be long before Catholics and the Bible are condemned for expressing a position condemning homosexual behavior.
 
Maximian said:
But should the law be changed to incorporate the idea that society itself is harmed when its members harbour such thoughts, because the potential for them to act on such thoughts is there.
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What’s that a movie with Tom Cruise… where they were able to read the minds of people to prevent crimes from happening based on the fact that someone was just thinking about creating a crime? ugh, runs to IMDB

Minority Report - fictional but still the idea didn’t work well in the end. 😉
 
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Things can be gravely immoral and be perfectly legal. We Christians are held to the law of God.

CCC

1935 The equality of men rests essentially on their dignity as persons and the rights that flow from it:

Every form of social or cultural discrimination in fundamental personal rights on the grounds of sex, race, color, social conditions, language, or religion must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God’s design.
 
I’m Catholic. I think like a Catholic. It was a rhetorical question, anyway. If we imprisoned everyone who sins (even in our own thoughts), we’d all be in jail. Because even those who take the faith seriously and try their best to be the person God wants them to be…will fail. Hence, the Sacrament of Confession. If you’d notice, I said I didn’t think one should be prosecuted for writing racist things in a diary.
 
What happens if you post something that doesn’t advocate violence or even the repeal of gay “marriage” in Finland?
Let’s say criticising your own church leadership on sponsoring Pride.
In June 2019, she directed a tweet at the leadership of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland, questioning its official sponsorship of the LGBT event “Pride 2019”
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She wrote: “How can the church’s doctrinal foundation, the Bible, be compatible with the lifting up of shame and sin as a subject of pride?”
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Räsänen attended two police interviews about the tweet as well as a pamphlet she wrote 16 years ago on human sexuality for a Christian foundation.

The police had already decided to drop the investigation into Mrs Räsänen’s pamphlet and concluded that there were no grounds to proceed with a prosecution. However, the Prosecutor General reopened the criminal investigation.

On 2nd March, the police interviewed Mrs Räsänen a second time about the tweet and on 5th March, Räsänen was informed that the Prosecutor General had launched two more investigations against her.
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Or writing a pamphlet that explains your denomination’s views on sexuality, which frankly isn’t any different from that of the Catholic Church.
The Evangelical Lutheran Mission Diocese of Finland ( Suomen evankelisluterilainen Lähetyshiippakunta – ELMDF) has announced that their Dean, Rev. Dr. Juhana Pohjola, was summoned for questioning at the Helsinki Police Department on February 11, 2020.

The interrogation lasted five hours. He has been declared suspected of “ethnic agitation.”

The ELMDF is under investigation by Finland’s Prosecutor General for the publication of a booklet upholding historic Christian teachings on human sexuality. That booklet is “Male and Female He Created Them: Homosexual Relationships Challenge the Christian Concept of Humanity,” written by Dr. Päivi Räsänen, a Member of Parliament in Finland and former Minister of the Interior. Dr. Räsänen is also under investigation by the Prosecutor General.

The ELMDF’s booklet was published in 2004, well before the 2017 legalization of same-sex marriage in Finland. In the work, Dr. Räsänen argues that homosexual activity must be identified as sin by the Church on the basis of the teachings of Scripture.
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Maximian said:
By analogy: if police discover a conspiracy they so not have to wait for it to be implemented before acting.
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A conspiracy is a plan to commit a crime in which the conspirators taken some concrete step to actually commit the crime. A racist sentiment by itself isn’t a plan to do something.

Simply writing “I hate black people” is not a crime or a plan to commit one. It’s an odious sentiment, but there’s no crime there. If it’s “my buddy Bob and I are planning to start killing black people and he’s stockpiling the ammo” now you might have a criminal conspiracy.
 
I think the framing of this question misses the more plausible real-world application.

The question I’d keep my eye on is whether a totalitarian government may be reasonably expected to imprison suspected dissidents in advance of (and without requiring) a specific “crime”. Alleged disposition to commit a crime (or disposition to ‘corrupt’ society by spreading ideas unsavoury by [XYZ] standard) is pretty much all a totalitarian government needs, to quietly disappear someone into a camp, or at least to ‘rescue’ their children from their custody.

No, by the way, I don’t think the USA is particularly close to that state (despite ugly bubbles towards it). China pops more quickly to mind.

Yes, I do think all free people need to stay vigilant to avoid their states moving that way. Because the impulse to totalitarianism (and ‘proactive’ interference in the minute details of civilians’ lives) pops up among all groups.

The idea of “innocent until proven guilty”, and indeed of prisons only being for people convicted of technical crimes, isn’t an automatic phenomenon or an inevitability. It exists for exactly the duration of time until it doesn’t. And yes, sure, it’s not hard to imagine a person’s diary getting dragged into ‘evidence’ by a totalitarian gov’t arguing its internal case about why Johnny X is a dangerous dissident waiting to happen, and needs to be sent away for re-education. Frankly though once you get to that point, I don’t think such a government would particularly care about whether you’ve even written something down in a diary, unless the diary is the only thing that brought you to their attention.

PS because I’m being all abstract here and answering the question from the angle of totalitarianism being bad, for the record: Racism is also evil and racist ideas aren’t okay.
 
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Maximian said:
In England, if you make a racist statement it is incitement to racial hatred and can be prosecuted. In practice this would only happen if it were done in a very public way.
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Luckily you’re not in Scotland.


The proposed legislation has drawn criticism from a cross-section of society and prompted a letter signed by 20 authors, including Val McDermid, which warned the plans could “stifle” freedom of speech.
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The Scottish Police Federation - which represents rank-and-file officers - claimed the bill “appears to paralyse freedom of speech in Scotland”.

The Faculty of Advocates has raised concerns over “unintended consequences” for free speech.
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Correction: you’re only slightly better off in England.

The Law Commission, an independent body that reviews England Wales’ law and recommends reforms, has argued that the ‘private dwelling’ defence, which stops people being convicted of stirring up division because their actions were in private places, should be removed from the Public Order Act.
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MNathaniel said:
I think the framing of this question misses the more plausible real-world application.

The question I’d keep my eye on is whether a totalitarian government may be reasonably expected to imprison suspected dissidents in advance of (and without requiring) a specific “crime”. Alleged disposition to commit a crime (or disposition to ‘corrupt’ society by spreading ideas unsavoury by [XYZ] standard) is pretty much all a totalitarian government needs, to quietly disappear someone into a camp, or at least to ‘rescue’ their children from their custody.
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This is somewhat of a grey area. You can certainly jail someone prior to a crime being committed. You don’t have to wait until the actual deed is done. But there needs to be a certain amount of evidence that the crime was going to be committed.

Look at the plot to kidnap and kill Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as an example. Once it was obvious that those morons were serious about the attempt there was a requirement to arrest them and charge them. I doubt if anyone would have been arrested for simply saying something like ‘Someone needs to take care of Whitmer’.
 
Freddy said:
This is somewhat of a grey area. You can certainly jail someone prior to a crime being committed. You don’t have to wait until the actual deed is done. But there needs to be a certain amount of evidence that the crime was going to be committed.

Look at the plot to kidnap and kill Gov. Gretchen Whitmer as an example. Once it was obvious that those morons were serious about the attempt there was a requirement to arrest them and charge them. I doubt if anyone would have been arrested for simply saying something like ‘Someone needs to take care of Whitmer’.
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I’m not up on my American politics (but whatever you’re describing sounds like there was an actual conspiracy/plot to commit a specific crime? And conspiracy is already a specific crime, isn’t it?). Keep in mind that my comments are with other countries in mind, and more abstract commentary about the tendencies and possibilities in an area where totalitarianism effectively takes root.

If anyone thinks no totalitarian government has ever imprisoned a perceived/potential dissident for something less than an active plot to kidnap and kill a politician… I’m not in the mood to put on a PBS special, so I’d only invite that person to play with Google, I guess.
 
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MNathaniel said:
If anyone thinks no totalitarian government has ever imprisoned a perceived/potential dissident for something less than an active plot to kidnap and kill a politician…
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At the point that a totalitarian gov is in place, nearly all of these discussions become moot. A key feature is that they can and do do whatever they deem required to perpetuate itself and the chosen class.

The “hate speech” debate is only meaningful in a system that purports a medium to high level of freedom.
 
True dat. Although in practice totalitarian governments do often try to plaster rationalizations on top of situations when it’s publicly known that they’ve suppressed someone as a dissident. Often framing such individuals as dangerous to the public, dangerous to peace or the fabric of society, mentally unstable, etc.

So I can imagine the language of “hate speech” lingering as a useful accusation in a totalitarian society.

Typically speaking totalitarian gov’ts don’t rule by military/police force alone. They also depend heavily on propagandizing through media and education systems, to keep the general population policing each other on the day-to-day.

Might be tangenting now though.
 
Prosecuting ideas? I think they followed that approach in Germany in the 30’s and 40’s It did not work out so well.
 
Maximian said:
But should the law be changed to incorporate the idea that society itself is harmed when its members harbour such thoughts, because the potential for them to act on such thoughts is there.
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The United States is not going to be doing this any time soon. We had a ton of constitutional law changes in the 1960s and 1970s that greatly the ability of law enforcement to do this sort of thing. The law is extremely unlikely to be changed back.

Can’t speak for what European countries might do; in my opinion their laws often do not respect individual rights, which is a big reason why I’m happy to be living in Amurrica.

In the US, people also like to rail against “thought crime” every time Amazon refuses to sell somebody’s book or social media deletes someone’s post, which to me is ridiculous. Amazon and social media aren’t the government.
 
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